first of all ensure you have a utf-8 locale: $LANG should be something like en_AU.UTF-8 (on debian or derived systems you can do this with dpkg-reconfigure locales). This should be done on every system involved. I.e. if you run screen, then ssh to another system, then screen, then irssi, you’ll need to do this twice. You’ll also need to login again to have LANG set by the system – you can just export it if you like.

now run uxterm, not xterm to start your terminal. (If you use a more primitive terminal, you may need to use a gui menu, or some other means to get it going)

Thats the terminal. Now, for screen (repeat for however many screens are in your chain) – in your ~/.screenrc (if you don’t have one, copy /etc/screenrc) put

defutf8 on

. To convert existing screens without restarting…,

Ctrl-A : defutf8 on

, and

Ctrl-A : utf8 on on

(yes on is repeated) should do the trick.

Ok, now for irssi. Just run it and it should work. If it doesn’t, check /set term_type – that should be utf8 (or at least, thats what mine is and it works🙂.

Thanks to the patience of #debian-devel, who suffered many repeated â½ to get this going..